


when you go away (i still see you)

by sadomasochism



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Angst, Do you want to cry, F/M, Heartbreak, Hurt No Comfort, good luck lol, literal pain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-13 22:08:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29160915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sadomasochism/pseuds/sadomasochism
Summary: she still loves him. sometimes love isn't enough.
Relationships: Suna Rintarou/Reader
Comments: 4
Kudos: 50





	1. things that could have (or should have) been

**Author's Note:**

> welcome to the end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> t/w: there is a suicide attempt mentioned in the first paragraph

1\. to semi eita, from y/n

You messaged me first. It was out of the blue, really; we’d talked briefly and I left it at that because I wasn’t really in the right mind to add the effort of carrying a conversation on the weight already on my back. I tried overdosing on Kenma’s hydrocodones—they were prescribed to him after he broke his foot—a month later.  
Then I got a message from you a month after that as I sat in Kiyoko’s BMW; she was driving us to a sex store in Sendai so I could help her pick out a vibrator. Just best friend duties. You asked me to go on a date with you, and I agreed because I had nothing left to lose and even though I didn’t know shit about you besides the fact that you used to go to school with Kenma before you dropped out.  
Kiyoko and I ended up getting matching tiny pink silicone bullets because why not; I got home to another message from you confirming that next Saturday would be great, and would I be okay with brunch?, and you telling me that you thought I was cute. Little did you know that I’d just tweeted a picture of me holding a bunch of dildos with the caption “suck my dick :)”.  
But you did know that I was thinking about bailing on our date because I had some Ben and Jerry’s, six shots of soju, and half a joint with Kuroo and Kenma for dinner on Friday night. I woke up at ten in the morning when I should have been getting ready to meet you. You still picked me up at eleven-thirty and even told me you were also thinking about flaking on me, but you were glad you didn’t.  
We had breakfast together and talked about our evil exes; yours showed up at your apartment last night while you were out with another date and you couldn’t go home until you knew for sure she’d left, and at that same exact time, mine didn’t give a fuck if I lived or died. In my crossfaded stupor, I was able to recite Suna’s phone number to Kenma—so he could call him for God knows why—and I was too blacked out to cry when Suna hung up.  
You took me to the animal shelter to go look at cats because you knew I wanted one, and I almost convinced you to adopt a dog. Neither of us wanted to go home after that, so I asked you if you had any errands you needed to run. My offer was apparently a big deal to you, and you didn’t mind taking me home first so I could change my shoes to something more appropriate for walking.  
In the car, you let me use your phone to change the music. I accidentally read a text you’d just received; your friend Tendo had “loved” your message to him that read “This is the best first date ever”. Me being me, I told you what I saw, and you owned up to it. After feeling like such a burden to everyone for so long, I welcomed it.  
We bought like fifty pounds of ice and went to your dad’s boat, the Huntress, to store it in the cooler since you had a trip at dawn the next day. I can’t swim and I get seasick, but I let you help me onto the boat anyways and watched you do your thing. It was a cool but sunny day and how many times in my life am I going to be on a boat? You told me not to look at you like that, or you’d have to kiss me. If I hadn’t been so numb, maybe I would have done more than laugh softly. I’m sorry, Eita.  
On the drive to the boba place, you kept dropping hints about what it would be like for me to be with you. How you’d let me do my own thing and not blame me for your issues and never just stop talking to me out of the blue. I assumed you were a good listener. When we waited in line I had the nerve to ask you if you could actually see us together. You said that if every date following this one was just as good, then yes, absolutely.  
Neither of us still wanted to leave each other then. So I went home with you and watched Skins on Netflix for the better part of five hours before I finally acknowledged the fact that despite us meeting not fourteen hours ago, I wanted to have sex with you.  
You said that your bed smelled like me and after one night of me sleeping over (which was an accident in the first place; I fell asleep after we fucked), you didn’t like waking up alone. You said you thought about me a lot.  
You told me that you could get used to it: working on your songs in your apartment, waiting for me to come home so we could watch TV on your couch or so I could do my homework at your dinner table every night.  
Our visits became sporadic after that. I stopped trying to contact you. I moved on—but sometimes I dream about those things, like getting groceries or giving your cats baths in the bathroom sink. Maybe my life would be different and I wouldn’t be crying to my mom about how I wish I could fix things with Rintarou. Maybe you’re sorry, too.  
And I wonder if you still think about me.

2\. my life as suna rintarou

y/n was always too sweet on me. Everyone could see it.  
I sprained my ankle in the first month of our senior year of high school after not being able to land a heelflip on my skateboard. It was devastating. I had to walk with crutches and get carted around to my classes like a fucking loser. I felt so lonely—I never really left my house more than was necessary. She and I had only reconnected two weeks before my injury happened, and were still trying to figure out how to work out our “friendship” for the sake of the team.  
For fuck’s sake, I ended up sleeping in her room two days after that “reconnection”. I kissed her out of impulse and had to go to bed still wearing my pants because I don’t think I could have controlled myself if I’d taken them off with my shirt.  
She was so kind. Whenever I needed company, I’d call her and she’d bring snacks and sit on my bed with me for a while, letting me talk her ears off. Sometimes she looked really tired, but she never complained.  
One particular instance was after my ankle healed and I got out of practice late because Kita made us practice our serves, and she’d offered to go pick up some hot cookies and vanilla ice cream. I agreed, and when Kita said we could leave, she was waiting for me by the door of the gym. She walked home with me and I put our “dinner” in the freezer so the ice cream wouldn’t melt.  
Then I kissed her, and then we got a little farther than kissing. A third-base type of far. I knew eventually she was going to ask me to take her virginity, which was the initial reason why we’d stopped talking before. I didn’t want to hurt her, I swear.  
We always did stuff with the lights off. That was pretty much her only rule. I didn’t like how she was so uncomfortable with her body because she was always really hot to me, but if it made her feel better, then that was fine with me.  
“You put the Pizookies in the freezer?” she asked me with a smile. “You’re gonna have to microwave them now.”  
“I didn’t think of that. I’ll go do it now.”  
“You’re going to microwave them in aluminum foil?”  
“I’ll get a plate.”  
Sugar was always her thing. I guess it fit her personality and the way she treated me. She was always getting us boba before coming over to hang out. If I asked her to bring me a chuupet, she’d already have one waiting for me in her bag.  
I loved her a lot. But I knew she loved me more.  
I didn’t know how to swallow that pill. No amount of sugar would make that medicine go down.

One night many months later, someone named Kenma called me and told me he was her roommate. I was finishing dinner with the rest of the EJP Raijin boys, and I couldn’t exactly get up and leave right away. It sounded like she was fucked up, so I told her to call me later.  
I woke up the next morning with a sickly sweet taste in my mouth. It didn’t get better when I saw she’d texted me asking if she could talk, and I couldn’t bring myself to respond.

Chocolate chip cookies don’t really taste the same anymore.


	2. memory is a delusion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> y/n thinks about him too much.

and we convince ourselves of things we want to be true. I want to believe that you loved me at one point or another. That you want to be with me indefinitely, and this is just an experiment in object permanence. Just because you aren’t in front of me doesn’t mean you’re gone forever. My dad doesn’t come into my room to say goodnight anymore and my mom doesn’t tell me she loves me anymore. I let them get drunk so I could sneak out of the house at half-past eleven and get in the Uber you were waiting in. We fucked made love that night and then you asked me   
to stay. If only I knew what I know now I would have risked the scolding no eighteen-year-old should ever have—but my parents don’t give a fuck how old you are—and fell asleep beside you. I want to believe that you loved me even when you left, because I can still recite the words you used like an incantation to destroy me and it doesn’t feel like you meant it. No one thinks you meant it. And I’ve waited years for you to call me, and tell me that you’re sorry, too, but you’ve only broken radio silence in my dreams; thus I have to tell myself that we’re together in a different lifetime and a different universe and maybe still under the same circumstances.

When it gets to be too much, I’ll have to tell myself that you were a figment of my imagination.

> search: things that make me various degrees of sad

>> results:  
> keanu reeves’ “personal life” section on wikipedia  
> knowing that osamu stopped dyeing his hair after he quit playing volleyball because he didn't feel like he needed to set himself apart from 'tsumu anymore  
> the posts of us you still have on your profile  
> you can’t see my face in them and only i (and atsumu and bokuto and shouyou and kuroo and kenma and for some reason lev? and probably kiyoko somehow) know it’s me  
> i told you you could post them because you could leave them up even after we split and i was joking but i guess you weren’t  
“you’re the only good thing in my life” by cigarettes after sex  
> i used to listen to this while i smoked behind the library  
> and when i’d lie in bed staring at the popcorn ceiling  
> and after i got discharged from the psych ward  
instagram user @wildfiresss   
> this one is embarrassing  
knowing that kuroo’s mom still loves his dad even though she’s married someone else  
eternal sunshine of the spotless mind  
> not the movie per se, but the symbolism  
SSRI commercials  
> just because they’re so poorly executed  
> and corny.  
the conversation on tinder that you had with alisa  
> “maybe instead of trying to talk to me, you should apologize to the girl you broke up with without offering any explanation”  
> “i think you are right.”  
> you never did.


	3. you kill me (in a good way)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> only the dictionary of obscure sorrows can help explain how they feel.

#  mauerbauertraurigkeit

  1. the inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends who you really like—as if all your social taste buds suddenly went numb, leaving you unable to distinguish cheap politeness from the taste of genuine affection, unable to recognize its rich and ambiguous flavors, its long and delicate maturation, or the simple fact that each tasting is double-blind.



There are many things Y/N knows about Suna Rintarou. She’s well-versed at reading people, just like him, and he’ll test her on what she can tell about his friends just by looking at them. He can be blunt to a fault, but she likes that because it means she doesn’t have to guess if he’s lying. 

He likes to talk in hypotheticals, and on long drives home they’d ruminate about how she could read his mind perfectly almost all the time and discuss how a romance anime with that plot would go down. 

He sleeps with a weighted blanket and on multiple occasions has asked her to wrap her arms around his head and pull him close to her chest so he can hear her heartbeat. It’s not because he’s a pervert, although he does think she has a great body. He likes the pressure. The one time he had a nervous breakdown he couldn’t control, he kept banging his head against the wall, and she put her hand against his forehead and let him hit her knuckles against the old white bricks of his room. Other times he’s sensitive to touch, and she learns not to take it personally when he asks her not to run her thumb over the ridges of his hand.

Suna’s tendency to be lazy made for lame excuses when he forgot important dates or refused to take her out on dates. Y/N was never one to back down from a challenge. A family in disrepair begat itself a fixer, apparently. An overcompensating one. Humans err on the side of learning by example, so it surprised Suna that it was possible for her to love him as much as she did.

His mom thought Y/N was controlling, on the basis that the latter would ask Suna to sleep earlier because he was grumpy and unproductive when he was tired and that she would warn him against the dangers of his hobbies. A wounded Y/N decided to speak her mind less; he went night skating with the twins and caught a cold and his mom brought them both chicken soup, oranges, and Theraflu because Y/N was the one taking care of him at her house.

His little sister once called Y/N emotionally selfish. Y/N was too stunned to ask why, but she knew it probably had something to do with the fact that Suna told his sister about how Y/N was still friendly with her ex when she and Suna were still just talking. He didn’t mention to his sister the fact that he himself was trying to hook up with other girls during that time, too.

Y/N knew all of this because she went through Suna’s phone while he was sleeping. She has a guilty conscience thanks to the mythology of the gods punishing humans and years of her mother telling her everything was somehow her fault. She confesses in a rainstorm of salt water, and he’s without an umbrella to take shelter under. He begs her to trust him, and she doesn’t believe in a vengeful God.

Later on, Atsumu confronts him at an Inarizaki reunion party about why he disappeared like smoke in the night; Suna tells Atsumu that he loved Y/N. He sings her praises like Orpheus, but also notes that Y/N was thinking about a white dress and the ring her grandmother wore long after her divorce and he ultimately felt like she wanted their movie to have an ending different from his script.

This time, Y/N can’t tell if Suna’s being truthful or not.

  
  


#  solivagant

  1. a solitary wanderer. A person who revels in the act of wandering alone—preferably in destinations and locations they have not previously visited.



Suna has a lot of free time on his hands now. Without Y/N, he only worries about himself, as if it’s any different than before. He thinks she’s why he fell behind in volleyball and why his friends don’t ask him to hang out and why he’s gained weight. He can do no wrong, after all.

She’s also the reason he’s still alive and not pinned down by all the responsibilities he liked to avoid. But that doesn’t matter anymore. Suna is supposed to be independent. He likes his personal space. Her telling him that the reason why she wanted to spend as much time with him as she could was because she knew she’d miss him when he went to training camp for the entire summer after high school means nothing now.

She offered to take the train there and visit. He told her to save her money and he’d meet her wherever she wanted. She said Tokyo, where she was going to university. He agreed.

Now months later, he looks at his boarding pass. The stopover is in Tokyo.

For a moment his heart aches. There’s no one to hold him or wipe his tears when he cries late at night anymore. There’s no more ramen dinners waiting for him at home. There’s an empty space between him and the wall right beside his bed. There’s a faint smell of pink pepper and bergamot in the blanket he wraps himself in on the plane. He doesn’t have a stuffed fox to hold in her place because she was the one who gave it to him and he gave it back to her. He no longer likes the taste of coffee and he can’t listen to Tame Impala because they remind him of mornings spent dancing in the kitchen to psychedelic guitar riffs.

But he reassures himself that he can live with the tradeoff.

Suna likes living alone, he thinks, in the apartment his family owns above a bar. At night, after he’s worn himself out at practice, he’ll go to the pub and order a beer on tap. He thinks of the year before, when he left for the first time and spent the summer in another training camp. The female managers there all liked him. He was free to do whatever he wanted.

So why did he still choose to go back to Y/N?

He cried the first time he went to a shrine with Y/N. He knew she wanted to believe that the gods didn’t hate her—or him, for that matter. He doesn’t know why he broke down when she talked about forgiveness. They left early and he told her in the car that his mom was going to lose her pregnancy but she prayed and he was born a miracle. He never thought anything, much less the gods, played a role in his life. That it was all up to him.

The stupid cuckoo clock in the apartment echoes the time; the sound reverberates through his ribcage, playing him like a xylophone. His neurons chime along to the beat of seven o’clock, and he finds himself thinking of quantum entanglement. Particles affect each other instantaneously over any distance. Entangled particles would have that connection even if they were across the universe. Or the country of Japan.

He rolls over in bed and tries not to think about Y/N. But it feels like she’s always thinking about him. And he knows that if she is, she’s probably worried about him. All she ever did was worry. He knows that she really doesn’t care about what he did to her. How he broke up with her like he was firing an employee, but with much less respect. Forgiveness is an act of love, and he recalls the times she’d say in passing that she hated herself.

Suna doesn’t know why that is—her heart isn’t gilded, it’s  _ golden _ . He thinks she deserves immortality. He silently says sorry, and hopes that one day he won’t be too scared to apologize to her. After all, it’s the least she deserves.

But he also thinks he won’t do it anytime soon. With any luck, she’ll forget about him.

#  enouement

  1. the bittersweetness of having arrived here in the future, where you can finally get the answers to how things turn out in the real world—what your friends would end up doing, where your choices would lead you, exactly when you’d lose the people you took for granted—which is priceless intel that you instinctively want to share with anybody who hadn’t already made the journey, as if there was some part of you who had volunteered to stay behind, who was still stationed at a forgotten outpost somewhere in the past, still eagerly awaiting news from the front.



She doesn’t. Y/N has never loved anyone that much before, and she’s well on her way to proving that you can die from a broken heart. The scientific explanation is stress-induced cardiomyopathy: part of the actual muscle enlarges and can’t pump blood all that well. 

Sometimes it feels like he can hear her at night, long after he’s drank himself into a stupor and sobered himself out of it, long after anyone’s doing burnouts down the long road outside his apartment, long after the nameless girl beside him has walk-of-shamed herself out of his present-tense. He hears hydrocodone pills rattling in their translucent orange bottle, the metronomic ECG monitor, the wheels of a gurney. Quieted, hiccuping sobs and the telltale wheeze she has when she hasn’t taken her inhaler. Drawn out breaths and the flick of a lighter.

One night, as he crawls under his sheets, he feels something stab him in the leg. Fumbling around in the dark, he realizes it’s one of her diamond earrings. He doesn’t question how it got there. It means it’s time he gives back her closure, too.

The next evening, her friends are yelling at him, telling him how much he’s screwed up. Y/N is lying on the couch and he can’t put the image of her there together with the one that’s haunted his dreams for the past year. He knows it’s his fault this time. He knows now that leaving quietly with her high and dry was much louder than he anticipated. He knows now that never telling her why he left, as if he didn’t owe the person he loved the most some semblance of an explanation, was wrong. He knows now that he should have at least done more when Kenma called him all those months ago, when Y/N was so drunk all she could remember was his phone number. He knew there were better ways to break her heart.

  
  



	4. at the end of the world, or the last thing i see

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to celebrate—”

“Kenma, this is a _funeral!_ ” Kuroo cries out, throwing a wadded ball of paper at the pudding-headed man standing on top of the coffee table. He is visibly distressed, the lenses of his new glasses fogged up with hot tears. “You had a week! You couldn’t come up with anything better than the _opening line the officiant gives at a wedding?!_ You’re making a mockery out of this shitshow!”

Kenma is now just as distressed as the hyperventilating boy, who has taken out his inhaler and resorted to pacing about the parlor room with Hinata on his heels. Their sneakers occasionally squeak against the linoleum of the apartment’s living room, making her wince. He shoots Atsumu a look of exasperation, but the latter only shrugs, taking a large sip from his teacup. “I don’t know, what am I supposed to say? She’s not even gone yet!”

The _she_ in question is Y/N, whose frail shell of existence is reclining on the couch; no one can really tell if and when she’s awake or asleep at this point. Her already bleak pallor had worsened in recent days, black roots peeking out of her brilliant blue hair. One of the last compound sentences she’d uttered was a request to have her friends throw her a goodbye party. 

“Just talk about your time with her,” Hinata says quietly. He’s since stopped following Kuroo around and is sitting on the floor by Atsumu. “That’s what she’d want.”

“Okay, fine, but can someone else go first? I think I need to be drunk for this,” Kenma groans. Atsumu wordlessly offers his teacup to him, and Kenma sniffs the drink inside. He gags. “Is this… have you been drinking sangria like a fucking Starbucks?”

The platinum blonde doesn’t bother to contain his laughter, and it’s a welcome but disorienting noise in the uncomfortable situation. It’s not every day your best friend forces you and your other friends to give your eulogies in front of her. “Yeah, since I got here. Honestly, I’m surprised no one said anything about me wearing sunglasses indoors.”

“I did. You just ignored me,” Kuroo calls from the kitchen. He’s rummaging through the refrigerator, trying to find where Kenma had hidden the hydrocodones from Y/N all those months ago. He spots them inside a ceramic jar of coffee grounds, nestled behind two-day-old milk tea and a box of Girl Scout cookies.

“You guys suck,” Hinata sighs, and stands up. He pulls his phone out to glance at his meticulous notes, then shakes his head and puts the phone back in his pocket.

“He’s right,” Y/N croaks. Everyone’s attention immediately turns to her. She coughs from the exerted effort it takes to insult her friends. Kuroo rushes to her side, putting a hand on her forehead. “Some family you all are.”

“You really don’t want us to call your parents, Y/N?” Kuroo murmurs. He’s trying his best not to burst into tears; her skin is so cold. “Just squeeze my hand twice if you do.”

He only feels her once. Of course she wouldn’t; after all, she’s still embarrassed over the fact she turned her family away for a boy they never liked in the first place. She wanted to get away from them and it blew up in her face. Hinata and Kenma look away so she doesn’t see them start crying. And thankfully, there’s a knock at the front door. Atsumu scowls when no one moves to answer it, but it only deepens when he does.

“ _What are you doing here?_ ” Atsumu hisses. Not the first thing you’d normally say when meeting someone again for the first time in several months. But the person at the door pushes past him.

“I need to talk to Y/N.”

“Uh, who are you?” Kenma asks as he uses his sleeve to dab his tears away. He can’t see the person properly, but if he did, he’d be able to put the face to the name he’d heard in dozens of stories.

Atsumu and Kuroo gape at each other. They communicate just by blinking. 

  * _Did you call him?_


  * No. He blocked my number. 


  * Why is he here?


  * Are you dumb?



“What’s wrong with her?” Suna snaps, standing over Y/N’s body. Her eyes fly open, but she can’t speak. All she can do is stare at him in front of her, dressed in all black.

“As if you don’t know,” Atsumu says through gritted teeth. He wants nothing more than to right hook the taller boy clean across the jaw. “ _You_ took her away from us. She was so much better off without you fucking everything up. We used to hang out and laugh at everything. We used to go out every weekend and she wouldn’t drink so that we could.”

“She doesn’t even like alc—”

“Fuck off, Suna, you son of a—”

Hinata struggles as he pulls Kuroo away, but he wants to say his peace, too. It’s a shock for everyone; Kuroo has always been the calm one that balances the group out. “It’s not like you care! You weren’t around to pick up the pieces when you left. You didn’t see her sleep with a knife under a pillow because she was terrified of sleeping alone. You weren’t spending every other fucking evening talking her out of a panic attack like Kenma did.”

Kenma comes out from behind their ficus plant, phone in hand. He’s mustered enough courage to speak to someone he’s only exchanged no more than ten words with after the drunk-Y/N incident. “I’m supposed to hate you,” he says. “But Y/N only ever talked about how much she loved spending time with you. And how much she hated the way you left.”

Atsumu is having none of it. “You’d think you’d do better by someone who’d sit on the floor of your bedroom just because you don’t want to be alone. And listen to you cry on the phone for hours because you can’t sleep and you hate yourself. And make time for you even if she barely has any for herself. You think you can express in words how much that person means to you, but you can’t.”

And Suna Rintarou can’t get a word in edgewise.

“Whenever one of us would be upset about something, she’d offer to take me out for dessert and drive around and take the long way home. We’d listen to music or talk about what was bothering us. And whenever we got home, she’d ask me to stay with her so she’d feel less lonely. If I needed something to wear to a party or if I had to get supplies for school, I wouldn’t even have to ask. She’d just give it to me and not expect it back.”

No one notices the faint wailing echoing in the street below.

“We love her so much. Do you know what it feels like to watch someone you love die from the inside out? Did you know that Y/N wanted to get sick so bad just to see if you’d care?”

Y/N tries to sit up. Hinata has to help her and props her up with a couch cushion. 

“I missed you more than you’ll ever know," she says.

Suna starts to cry.

“I never got to say goodbye to you,” she adds.

And then the sirens are right outside.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> maybe they're still together, though?


End file.
